Erlend Loe

Why skimmed milk of all things? he asks.

My good man, I say, skimmed milk represents the peak of human achievement to date. Any idiot has always been able to get ordinary cow milk, I say, but the leap up to skimmed milk requires a stroke of brilliance and sublime separation technology, which has only been made possible in modern times. And, in fact, I fear that humankind will progress no further. Skimmed milk will probably always reign supreme. But it does give us something to aspire to.

Skimmed milk ennobles mankind.

And by some miracle all my bathroom thoughts had called it a day. I could hardly remember the last time I wasn’t thinking about the bathroom. But now it had gone from my mind. All of a sudden I wasn’t thinking about whether we should have Italian tiles or Spanish ones or matt or gloss, or whether we should simply treat ourselves to glass mosaic, which of course my wife was really keen on. Not to mention colour. I wasn’t even thinking about colours. Not about blue. Not about green. Not about white. It wasn’t that I no longer cared about the colour of the ceiling or the tiles, but the very idea of it had simply disappeared. I had been spared this eternal merry-go-round in my head.

In good times and bad, they said when we got married. The problem with this is, of course, that any one time can be good for one person and bad for the other.

so we go back to the tent and continue to do nothing until we get bored. It’s embedded in our DNA that we constantly have to be doing things. Finding things to do. As long as you’re active that’s fine, in a way, however mindless the activity.

Boredom is underrated. I tell Gregus that my plan is to bore myself to happiness.

One problem with people is that as soon as they fill a space it’s them you see and not the space. Large, desolate landscapes stop being large, desolate landscapes once they have people in them. They define what the eye sees. And the human eye is almost always directed at other humans. In this way an illusion is created that humans are more important than those things on earth which are not human. It’s a sick illusion. Perhaps elk are the most important creatures when it comes down to it, I say to Bongo.

Unfortunately a small dog was hurt while I was working on this book, but it received treatment fairly quickly and is now doing well, all things considered.)

(Unfortunately a small dog was hurt while I was working on this book, but it received treatment fairly quickly and is now doing well, all things considered.)